SASKATOON — Farmers affiliated with grain companies won’t be prevented from serving on the board of directors of the Saskatchewan Canola Development Commission after all.
At the commission’s annual meeting in January, farmers voted 38 to 14 to bar directors or delegates of grain companies from serving as directors or employees of the commission.
The vote reflected concerns that if commission directors are also officials of companies like Saskatchewan Wheat Pool or United Grain Growers, they could influence the commission’s decisions on research funding to favor their own organizations.
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But at a board meeting last week, the commission’s directors decided not to follow through on the resolution. Instead, said general manager John Christensen, the commission will write formal conflict-of-interest guidelines to prevent directors from making decisions affecting outside organizations in which they are involved.
Dangerous precedent
He said the board decided that barring certain individuals from sitting on the board would set an “extremely dangerous precedent” for the canola commission and other groups funded by checkoffs.
“If we start putting on all these restrictions we’re soon in a position where no one with any outside affiliation can participate,” said Christensen. “It would just mushroom.”
The provincial legislation under which the commission was set up states that any farmer who pays the checkoff is eligible to run for election, so the act would have to be amended to satisfy the resolution. The government official said it would co-operate if the commission decided to follow that course of action, but the board decided against it.
Christensen said the board now has just an informal understanding that a director will declare a conflict of interest and leave the meeting.
“We need to develop a formalized procedure on how to deal with conflicts of interest,” a process that will likely take several months, he said.
Eric Pankratz, the Foam Lake, Sask., farmer who raised the issue at the annual meeting, said he was surprised and disappointed by the board’s decision.
“I though the resolution was pretty well worded so that something stronger than that would have to be done,” he said, noting that the motion was supported by a wide majority.
He said he was surprised that the board doesn’t feel bound to follow the wishes of the members as expressed at the annual meeting: “This is not really what we expected.”
Right now the commission’s six-member board includes two delegates and one director of Saskatchewan Wheat Pool. Christensen said the resolution was clearly aimed at the pool, a charge denied by Pankratz.
Christensen said one difficult issue is what level of involvement in an outside organization is required for there to be a conflict of interest. For example, being a pool director could put someone into a conflict, but just being a delegate probably wouldn’t.
He added that with just six people on the board, the commission could regularly find itself short of a four-member quorum if the definition of a conflict was too broad.
